AAAAR Artists Activists A(u)ction Against Racism, 2011-2013

In 2011 a change in migration laws demanded that people from third countries living in Austria had to proof they counted minimum with 8,000 euros in their bank accounts in the two months prior before they asked for the extension of their visa. We organized a massive art a(u)ction, and addressed renowned artists to denounce the persecution of migrants. In our performance we filled immigration papers one after another. Every time an artwork got sold, the bureaucratic machine activated allowing us to plant a collective stamp on the papers we were filling. As the collected amount rose we revealed the sentence: "If law becomes violence, resistance becomes an obligation". In the final speech of the spectacle we pointed to the absence of an institutionalized response by the academy and we questioned the role of art in the current political circumstances. The collected money went to set up a fund that dedicated to deal with these administrative measures.

The first art auction at the Academy of Fine Arts organized by a group of artists, activists, students, workers, migrants with the purpose to collect money to overcome discriminatory migration laws and administrative regulations against those coming to study from countries outside of the European Union. Main Aula of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in Schillerplatz.

The success of the a(u)ction the prior year led the academy inviting us to repeat the action. In the spectacle 'Your Comfort is My Silence', the auctioneer is taken over by a sickness that makes her incapable to restrain herself. This condition spreads onto a group speech on the sans papiers, the refugee and asylum seekers movement and lasts all night as the auctioneer sells artworks.

The Academy of Fine of Arts invited us to organize the auction a third time but the amount of unpaid work it involved made us decline. I passed on my organizing files and data when the organizing group revealed there was a plan to give the outcome of the auction to the refugee protest in Vienna. Progressively the auction transformed until its current version.